On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Juergen Schmidt <jogischm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Am Freitag, 23. November 2012 um 18:26 schrieb Rob Weir: >> Currently our website has a header, controlled by >> ooo-site/brand.mdtext, that we use to promote special events and >> announcements. This header shows up on every page on the website, >> except for wiki and other non-static web pages. >> >> This header is our single most effective way to promote things. It >> gets 750K+ views per day. This is far more than our blog, Twitter, >> mailing lists, Facebook, etc., combined. >> >> However, this position currently can carry only a single message at a >> time. So when we have several messages in quick succession, we need >> to halt the old announcement and replace it with a new one. For >> example, when I added the marketing volunteers, I had to stop the call >> for QA volunteers. Juergen has a call for translators coming, and >> that will likely cause us to halt the marketing call for volunteers. >> And we want to put up a FOSDEM call for papers soon as well. >> >> So the way we're using this it is all or nothing. A message either >> gets 750K views a day or it gets nothing. >> >> I think this is not optimal. It is natural for us to have several >> ongoing promotions, and it would be sufficient if we could more >> effectively share that space. >> >> One idea might be to not have a static message in brand.mdtext, but >> encode several messages in a Javascript file, a JSON object that lists >> all the current messages along with their weighting. Then we could >> have our website header show a random message, respecting the weights. >> A high weighted message would get more views than a lower weighted >> one. But even 10% of 750K is a lot more views that our blog will >> receive. >> >> Does this make sense? > for me it makes a lot of sense and we try to use the page hits in the most > efficient way. >> >> Any other ideas? Any ideas on how to implement this? >> >> Another idea is to allow graphical as well as the current text-only >> promotions. A banner graphic can be even more effective. >> >> > > no real idea how we can achieve it, the CMS is limited as far as I understood > but Joe is probably open for improvements. I am a poor web developer ;-) >
We don't have PHP at runtime, but we do have perl at page build time, e.g.,: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo/ooo-site/trunk/lib/view.pm But hard-coding at build time doesn't give us rotation, unless we have a cron job or something that marks all the files as dirty every 5 minutes or so. I don't think we want that. It might be worth looking at how the ASF home page handles its "featured projects": http://www.apache.org/ Or we can just do with Javascript. It is easy enough to make the experience for those without JS to be the same as what they see today, a single hard-coded message. -Rob > Juergen >> >> Regards, >> >> -Rob >
